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Thursday, July 10, 2014

A month ago MTV's VP Off Air Creative Jim F. deBarros asked me to come up with concept for a new MTV series, "Finding Carter". The series follows Carter Stevens, a young girl who has a perfect life with her single mother Lori, until a police bust at a party reveals that Carter is a missing child abducted by Lori. Now, Carter returns to her biological family and must navigate through her new life whilst vowing to be reunited with Lori.

Of course my first thought was the milk carton missing child alert, but that was not enough. Then I remembered the idiom, "spilled milk" which Americans use when something goes wrong.

Campaign was photographed by Rene Cervantes.

Designed by Chris Peck and Lance Rusoff.

Art Directed by me.

On July 8th was first episode of the show on MTV.
Announced by billboards, posters, and digital media some of which you can see below:

Here is a few photographs of "Finding Carter" billboard in Los Angeles,
posted by Daily Billboard blog, with comment: "With its clever milk carton visual you instantly know that MTV's Finding Carter series is going to be about a missing child in some way or another."

Here's also the landscape version of the ad creative which works equally well and was spied further west along the Sunset Strip.

But when I started to think about the poster I was less excited and more concerned.
I needed to design a poster for a show that include 60+ posters, by the 29 most famous American designers. How to create a poster celebrating other posters and not overwhelm them with your own design/ego?
I started to think about three elements that needed to appear on the poster, and that are actually part of the the title: Underground/subway, posters, and School of Visual Arts. Because of his recent departure the poster of Tony Palladino (1930-2014) “It’s Not the Light at the End of The Tunnel, It’s the Light Within” came to my mind.

I decided, as an homage to Palladino, to also create a tunnel (subway tunnel), using only posters and the SVA logo. All three elements from the title are there. To avoid any politics, whose poster is bigger, whose poster is more important, I decided to arrange them from lightest to darkest, and that way create walls and the effect of light coming from the end of the tunnel.

I used those two images as a texture map to create a tunnel and then I added the SVA logo which already looked to me like a cartoon-like light.

All I needed to do afterwards was to darken up the top and the bottom of the poster to make the text more legible, considering it will be adjusted for various languages and venues. This is the first variation of the poster and it is going to be used for the SVA show in Marseille at Villa Mediterranee as a part of The Graphic Design Encounters festival.